Who has rights? What rights do they have? Can circumstances change regarding who does and doesn't have rights? And should entities other than humans have rights? These are some of the central questions posed by legislation passed in late December by the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota to ensure the rights something unexpected: manoomin wild rice.

The statutes represent landmark legislation in the United States since they are the first “to recognize legal rights of a plant species,” said Mari Margil, head of the International Center for the Rights of Nature at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). The new statutes, drafted in consultation with CELDF, include provisions to allow manoomin to "exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve." Consistent with this goal is the right to have pure water and a healthy climate system, the right to be free from patents, and the right to be free from contamination by genetically engineered organisms.

In summary, manoomin wild rice is deserving of legal standing in U.S. courts — legal personhood. This would allow people, or organizations, to bring lawsuits on behalf of wild rice arguing that the grain itself was being harmed through an action. There would be no need to demonstrate that a person, or another entity with legal personhood, like a corporation, was being harmed.

The nascent legislation was deemed “necessary to provide a legal basis to protect wild rice and freshwater resources as part of [White Earth’s] primary treaty foods for future generations,” according to the adopted resolutions.

While the statutes are notable as being the first series of Western-style laws to recognize a plant species—and the ecosystem of which it is a part—the adoption of similar legislation is not new. Often stylized or named as “Rights of Nature,” these pieces of legislation extend the conceptual framework of who is deserving of rights to include the natural world.

The modern rights-of-nature movement can be traced back to 1972, when U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote the dissenting opinion in Sierra Club v. Morton, a case brought by the Sierra Club to try and stop approval of a ski resort in the Mineral King Valley in the Sequoia National Forest. Basing his dissent on Christopher Stone’s essay “Should Trees Have Standing,” in which Stone argued that extending rights to nature was the continuation of the development of human rights, Justice Douglas noted that “inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation…[and] so it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes…or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life.”

In this sense, the movement for rights of nature is more than just a level of enhanced environmental protection or even the development of a new way of thinking about nature in the modern world. It is all of that, but it is also the act of asserting traditional Indigenous law and philosophy into modern society. That, in turn, has led Elaine C. Hsiao, a scholar at the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, to argue that “through a process of reclaiming environmental rights, indigenous sovereignty itself can be restored.”

Because of this, whether the legislation is effective or not is ultimately not the most important point to Indigenous communities. As Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi), associate professor of Philosophy and Community Sustainability at Michigan State University, tells Teen Vogue, the ultimate hope is that "when people begin to see non-humans as rights holders, they have to deal with the complexity of the ecosystems that must be maintained and protected to honor those rights." This thought, as the future of the rights of nature, compels citizens to more fully and clearly recognize the richness and complexity of Indigenous communities around them, as well as of the natural world they interact with every day.

As Whyte says, if we recognize that world, the hope is that we will fully recognize "a sense of responsibility and ways of carrying out responsibilities" in that world.